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I don't WANT the Internet to forget!

Web-HTML,Blogging,Security,Opinion 2009/10/23

I was listening to an NPR show about internet privacy and the "worrysome" fact that internet information lasts forever. The very forgettable guest being interviewed was harping on "forgetting" - he apparently wants us to be able to set retention dates for things the Internet knows about us. Callers chimed in with stories of real and potential embarrassment from discretions and more serious actions that their boss, their children or their spouses might accidentally discover while bumbling about the Internet. SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!

I don't agree.

If you want to go digging around, you can find some "embarrassing" stuff about me on the Internet. That is, you'd find stuff that you might THINK would embarrass me and probably would embarrass whoever that "let's forget it" guy is and apparently could upset some of the people who called in all worried about something they said or did in 1994. As for me, I don't care. If you aren't smart enough to realize that EVERYBODY has skeletons in their closet, that EVERYBODY has been petty, vain, jealous, stupid, dishonest, and worse, why would I care what you think about me?

Wouldn't we all be better off if we stopped pretending that we are perfect or even close to it? I'm not saying we shouldn't strive toward not being jackasses, not doing dumb things. I'm saying we should accept that we are human, we do screw up and we and everyone else just need to get over it.

Maybe if everyone's "dirt" was always easily dredged up we could dispense with this fantasy of saintly people passing through their oh-so-perfect lives without any stain of error. Maybe if nobody could hide their indiscretions and mistakes, our children would better know how to avoid or mitigate their own?

Say it with me now: I can be a jackass and so can everyone else. I have done stupid things, cruel things, idiotic things and so has everyone else. Anyone who presents a perfect facade to the world has dirt behind the curtain and is lying to us overtly or by omission.

If I'm trying to find out what kind of person you are and I come up with nothing, what have I learned? What are the possibilities? Either you've been really sneaky and secretive or you are such a timid, inactive and uninvolved person that you've never had an opportunity to screw up. Do I really like either of those? No.

Let's stop being phony. People screw up. Maybe there are a few untainted people somewhere, but most of us wouldn't like them because they probably have no fire, no spark, nothing to make them interesting. They walk through life so carefully, so fearful of error - what clods!

So no, I don't want the internet to forget anything about me. I want it all preserved forever. I want my future relatives to be able to learn things about me that I can't learn about my ancestors. I want future historians to have a treasure trove of data that will tell them societal secrets that are almost never known about past generations. I don't WANT the Internet to forget!

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

Wicked Smaht

Opinion,Employment 2009/10/19

For our non-New England readers: In the Boston area and even down into Rhode Island, a lot of us tend to pronounce our r's as h's (though a Rhode Islander might say "our r's as haitches", but that's a different story).

When I went into first grade, I was put in the Retarded Class. I'm sure that's not what it was officially called, but all of us who were in it knew that's what it was, and of course so did every other child and all the teachers. Everybody knew us. We were the misfits, the dummies, the slow learners, the problem kids. This was early 1950's, so in reality a lot of us were dyslexic or had alcoholic parents or other learning disadvantages and disabilities, but paying attention to any of that just didn't exist then.

The cause for my inclusion was near blindness. Without corrective lenses, my extremely astigmatic vision is 20/400 - which means that what people with 20/20 vision can see clearly at 400 feet away, I need moved 380 feet closer. It meant I couldn't see the chalkboard. That was enough to make me "dumb".

Yes, of course they gave us vision tests. In groups, they'd lead us through reading the lines on a chart. I'd hang back and easily memorize every line read and thereby passed those tests every time. I knew I couldn't see well, but I didn't want glasses because in the Retard Class society I lived in, glasses were a big Kick Me sign. I'd had a hard enough time establishing myself as someone to leave alone (because I'd hit back, hard) and I didn't want to jeopardize that.

Eventually, I got caught. I don't remember whether it was an eye test that I failed or if they caught me with an IQ test, but they caught me.

Oh, those IQ tests. I was always good at those. I'd be the first one done and sometimes teachers would look surprised as I handed in my tests so early. I've taken the ones you aren't supposed to finish, too: I always finished them. Yeah, I'm real good at IQ tests.

So they moved me and my new glasses into a Gifted and Talented class. That was something very new then; I and the other Chosen Ones were only the second such class ever in our very progressive town. There was resistance to even having such a class, but that's a different story also.

According to some, I was the "smartest one". I certainly didn't think so, but that was the rumor and it kept coming up throughout my star-crossed educational career. You might think that's wonderful, but really it isn't.

I was bored. I was angry. I hated school, disliked most of my teachers, and spent most of my time daydreaming and yearning to be "free". I never did much homework, never listened much in class, but of course I got by because I was "wicked smaht". It's easy to get B's and C's when you read a lot and are "wicked smaht".

Throughout my life, I've learned a lot about being "smart". One of the first things I learned is that you don't think like other people. I don't just mean that you come to different conclusions, but that you get there on a different path. The "others" can't follow your logic, and they think you are "strange" because of what you think and how you think it. That would be fine if you were always right, but of course you are not.

No matter how Wicked Smaht you are, you can be wrong. Horribly wrong, tragically wrong. Fortunately I learned that lesson early enough not to be a total dick about being so good at IQ tests. I knew that while that prodigious brain power might matter sometimes, most of the time it doesn't matter at all. Most real world problems are far too complicated for anyone, so while my arguments may seem more cogent, while I might have more "facts" to back them up, I am still likely to be wrong. Brains mostly don't matter.

Being smart doesn't necessarily make you successful, and you definitely don't need to be very smart to reach success. Being smart won't make you good friends, and won't help you fall in love. It won't make you lucky and can't protect you from disease and aging.

Sometimes people won't get your jokes, will miss your sarcasm. Things you say will fly right over their heads. That will always surprise you, no matter how many times it happens.

Being smart won't help you work with groups. Remember, you don't think like they do. You don't like the way they think, they don't like the way you think. You think they are dumb, and they think exactly the same about you. Guess what: they are every bit as right as you are - because for real world decisions, you don't necessarily have any advantage (even though you think you do).

Being Wicked Smaht is a lot less valuable than being nice. It's far less important than being honest and trustworthy, dependable and faithful to your friends. For everything that matters, being smart is unimportant.

Sometimes I wonder if I would have been happier with the Retards. I did end up happy, but that had nothing to do with being "smart". It had to do with controlling my own life and living it with a wonderful woman. Two great children also made me happy. Good friends, wicked smaht or not, made me happy. My sisters, my nephews, their kids - they make me happy. Smart? Who cares?

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

Let's NOT have a revolution

Opinion 2009/10/15

I listened to Bruce Judson on NPR yesterday discussing his new book, It Could Happen Here: America on the Brink .

Unfortunately, Bruce has a poor speaking voice - you can hear him at his blog (and also get a quick overview of what the book is about). Don't let his voice interfere with what he has to say - it's important.

You can also read this Huffington Post column for background.

My more right leaning readers won't like what he has to say - but you haven't liked what I've said about this either, so that's nothing new. It's that horrible "socialism" again, stealing money from hard working folks who earned it by the sweat of their brow, you can't punish the wealthy, yadda, yadda.

OK, fine, we hear you. But both history and modern game theory teaches that if you get too greedy, you are likely to lose it all. Right now, the rich are far too greedy: close to 25% of all income is concentrated in the top 1% of U.S. taxpayers.

Perhaps even worse, overall wealth is concentrated even more: more than half of it is held by 5% of our population.

Let's forget about the suffering of the poor, the vanishing middle class. We are unimportant, voiceless, powerless. Let's accept the right's insistence that concentration of wealth is good and just. Forget morality, let's just talk about those all important rich people who do matter: if they keep greedily grabbing every crumb, their world will crash around them.

Bruce Judson's book posits a revolution of the left, rising up to demand higher taxes for the rich, more social programs and free health care. That could happen, though I think it's more likely to come from the right, the "tea party" people, who will want the Constitution re-written with "Christian" guidance. In the NPR interview, Bruce agreed that it could go that way just as easily.

The point is that people WILL reach a breaking point and all hell WILL break loose. Maybe not now, maybe not until we're squeezed a lot harder, but it will happen. I don't know how bad unemployment has to get or how many families need to be forced out of their homes, but at some point, people will stop being civil, stop hoping that politicians will act, and will tear down the system with their bare hands.

None of us wants that. Not the poor, not the struggling middle class, but most of all the wealthy should fear this the most. They have the most to lose and the farthest to fall. It's one thing to move from a rat infested apartment to a refrigerator box under a bridge - it's quite another to move from a mansion.

I'm almost 62 years old. My retirement funds have been hurt badly and my income has gone down almost 40%. I'm still surviving, and actually living pretty high on the hog, all things considered. But it wouldn't take an awful lot more damage to push me into desperate straits. A serious medical condition, another stock market crash - it could happen, and my reserves are now too weak to survive it. Could I become a guerilla revolutionary? Yeah, honestly, it could happen. It's not likely, but it's not inconceivable,

If I, living in relative luxury, feel like that, what do you think the guy who has been out of work for a year is feeling? What about my daughter's friend whose wife just died after a long cancer fight and the medical bills that exceeded his insurance cap have forced him and his children to lose their home? What's he feeling?

So keep on saying it's "socialist" to raise taxes. Keep on saying we can't break up these giant corporations. Keep on saying we can't afford universal health insurance, can't afford welfare programs, can't afford this, can't afford that. Keep on saying it until it all blows up.

And then what have you got?

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

Playing god

Opinion,Programming 2009/10/11

Some of you may have played "games" like Second Life. If not, you probably know what it is. I'd like you to imagine that it's a few hundred years from now and that I'm a computer game designer working on an advanced version of this game.

Computers have changed a lot. Storage is basically unlimited and processing power is beyond anything you could comprehend. I finally have enough resources at my disposal that I can actually create sentience within the "game". That is, I can populate it with creatures who can pass a Turing test, who apparently have "free will". These pockets of sentience evolved from some of my original designs, and are pretty darn complicated, but of course I can still run any of it through a debugger if I want to. I can also change the physics of their little Universe...

In other words, I can "play god".

Would I? Would you? I think I can answer that I definitely would not, though certainly there would be temptation. But if I really thought that this computer generated world was very real to its software denizens, and really thought of them as sentient beings, how could I? I might want to, I might even sometimes try to convince myself that interfering in some specific place might be more moral than remaining hands off, but I would hope that I would resist that temptation because it's all downhill from there.

The atheists in the group have likely already guessed what comes next. Some of those little programs (that's what they are, right?) have become religious. They have imagined a "Creator" and are busily begging it for various actions and non-actions, any of which I could easily provide - if I wanted to "play god".

How would you feel about those beseechers of favors great and small? I'd feel sorry for them. Sorry that they don't understand that it was all only a game. Sorry that they weren't smart enough to see how the game works yet - and I'd wonder if they ever could be smart enough: can a computer program realize that it is just a bit of code?

I wouldn't play god. If these little programs were as bent on self destruction as we seem to be, I don't think I could even watch. I couldn't turn the game off - that would be immoral too. I'd just let it run by itself and make a promise to myself to never create anything like that again. I'd also warn everyone I knew that they shouldn't dabble with such games either.

How about you?

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

I am always right - aren't you?

Employment,Opinion 2009/09/30

I had some unpleasant email exchanges with someone today. Of course it was about politics and religion - the two subjects almost guaranteed to cause hard feelings. I'm not going to get into that except to note that it can be upsetting to mix our personal lives with our business lives. It's particularly hard for someone like me who is way out of the mainstream in so many ways. I know full well that I don't agree with most of my customers political views and of course they wouldn't like mine very much either. It's fortunate that our two worlds stay separate most of the time - or I'd lose a lot of business!

This morning's email exchange came because I did let a customer into Facebook. That was a mistake, but on the other hand most of my political views are right here in the Opinion section, so I didn't think Facebook would cause any more hard feelings than those pages. I was wrong :-)

Anyway, as I said, that's not the purpose of this post. One sentence from today's exchanges stuck with me:

"I've read a lot of your stuff and it exudes an I'm always right and I know more than you feel to it."

Umm.. don't we ALWAYS think we are right? Sure, there's room for doubt and sometimes we just say "I have no idea", but if we have reached an opinion on who to vote for or what to do about Pakistan, illegal aliens or whatever, don't we always think we are RIGHT? Can you hold an opinion that you think is wrong? Of course not.

I can certainly admit that I definitely come across as arrogant, confident and as "I know more than you". But let's be honest here: if you've reached a decision, you DO feel you know more than someone who disagrees with you. Oh, you can sugar coat it, you can even say that there is room for disagreement or admit that you might be wrong, but the fact is that you have analyzed the available facts and reached an opinion. You might be very ready to change that opinion should more facts arrive, but right now you are confident that you are right. How could you not be?

I'm reminded of "Often wrong, never in doubt". I don't know who said it, but I definitely feel that way. If that's arrogance, fine, I'm arrogant - and so is every successful person I have ever known. I wrote about that at Arrogance or confidence, where I asserted that you HAVE to be confident to be successful.

As to "I know more than you" : well, yeah, that's part of it also. If I'm sitting with ten people I don't know, yes, I'm going to assume that I probably know more than they do about any random subject. I might be dead wrong about that, and being wrong doesn't upset me, but yes, that is my assumption until I learn differently. Again, arrogance or confidence, your choice.

If you are a mousy little person who always thinks everyone else is better than you are, these words might make you angry. Well, I'm sorry, but that's your problem, and it IS a problem: you aren't likely to get anywhere if you aren't confident and aggressive. I don't mean over-confident: you have to be realistic. If I sat down with ten random people to play poker, I'd expect to win. If I sat down with ten WSP pros, I'd expect to go home broke. Real confidence is knowing your abilities and limits.

So, are you arrogant or confident? Do you know your limits and abilities? Are you the smartest person in the room until shown otherwise?

Good for you. We'll get along just fine. We just shouldn't talk about politics or religion.

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.

Brave new world

Opinion 2009/08/30

My wife and I were watching "3:10 to Yuma" (violent and predictable, but far from the worse we've watched recently) and when we noticed Peter Fonda in the credits, my wife couldn't recognize who he had played. Well, of course he's gotten a bit older over the years, and his role barely mattered anyway, so that wasn't surprising. After we dug back and figured out which character was his, I commented that in a few years we'll probably start seeing computer generated actors resurrect stars of the past.

I didn't realize how close we are to that. So close that there is already a name for it - "synthespians" - and that people doing this kind of work say they are "getting real close".

With all the film stock to draw from, absolute accuracy shouldn't be a problem, even down to the smallest gesture or facial expression. So what happens to the real stars? Maybe they will get paid for the use of their name and likeness, but that won't last: totally artificial actors will replace them and, over time, no one will care. The era of the highly paid Hollywood actor is about to end. Hollywood stars aren't the only ones affected; "extras" have already been pushed out of some films and of course many other small parts will also be replaced by synthespians.

Funny, isn't it: in the science fiction of the past, computers were going to liberate us, relieve us from drudge work, make us all wealthy. While some of that has come true, computers have also widened income disparity, pushing some people out of good paying jobs.

What's next? Music? Some say that's farther away, but I'm not so sure. Combining computer created music with generated pop/rock star idols is a tougher sell, but it could come to pass. Maybe the only safe celebrities are sports stars?

It's a brave new world, isn't it?

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Many of the products and books I review are things I purchased for my own use. Some were given to me specifically for the purpose of reviewing them.